YWCA of Summit County
& Race Relations
The story of the integration of the facilities, programs and personnel of the Akron YWCA is a complicated one -- one that needs to be told within the broader social landscape of the early 20th century.Like so many other Midwestern industrial cities of the time, Akron had a relatively small, albeit segregated, African-American community. In 1900, only 525 African Americans called Akron home.
Nonetheless, a vein of racism ran deep through the community. Just one year before the YWCA was organized in Akron, the city was shaken by a thwarted lynching party. That year, an African-American man was accused of assaulting a 6-year-old white girl. The sheriff, sensing the tension in the city, sent the man to Cleveland to be housed. When a mob gathered outside City Hall, demanding the accused man, police fired into the crowd and two children were killed. By the end of the night, City Hall and the building next to it had been dynamited and burned to the ground. The militia had to be called in to restore order.
Sporadic racial problems cropped up in Akron during the first decade of the 20th century. But racism burned bright after blacks and whites came up from West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee for jobs in the rubber factories during World War I
The transplanted white Southerners brought Jim Crow attitudes with them. They didn't want African Americans sitting next to them on the buses, eating in the same restaurants or living next to them. African Americans were forced to settle in squalid conditions in the worst parts of town.
The transplanted white Southerners also brought the Ku Klux Klan with them. Akron became one of the principle KKK hotbeds in the nation. For a time, the Klan ruled Akron politics.
The Akron YWCA operated within this urban environment.
The African-American community seemed to be invisible to the founders and early leaders of the YWCA in Akron.
When the YWCA started in the city, there were no African-American charter members. There is no evidence that the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church had been asked to send a representative to any of the early YWCA meetings. Thus, although the Akron YWCA was organized on a Protestant denominational basis, it did not include churches with any sizeable African-American membership.
Early programming, likewise, did not appear to include African Americans. Photographs of the earliest athletic, children's, religious and industrial groups did not reveal any African-Americans. The issue of even offering African-American programming did not come up in the minutes from the early years of the Akron YWCA.
However, African Americans did not stay invisible for long. Policies of the national YWCA and the actions of the African Americans in the city were going to change the Akron association.
In 1908, the national YWCA formed a "Council on Colored Work" and hired a staffer to work with local associations on bringing blacks into the organization. In 1918, that staffer came to Akron to advise the group on how best to accomplish those goals. The highlight of that short, but well-orchestrated, visit was a luncheon and lecture with the prominent black women in the city.
A few years would pass before African Americans would break the color barrier in the Akron YWCA.
African Americans joined the Akron YWCA through segregated clubs, organizations and athletic teams.
The young were the first to break the color barrier.
The earliest African Americans came into the Akron YWCA through the Girl Reserves program in 1920 and after under "Foreign and Colored Girl Reserve Work." African-American teens and advisers organized Girl Reserves clubs and organizations. One of the first such clubs was at the "Colored Community Center." Other segregated groups followed, at the Howe and Seiberling schools.
The integration of the Girl Reserves of Akron came about only after new policies were adopted by the national organization of the YWCA. Under the new charge put in place in 1929, Girl Reserves clubs were required to work "with the teen-age girl, irrespective of creed or race." It was this policy that led to the integration of at least one of the Girl Reserves clubs in Akron by the 1940s.
Other policies adopted by the national organization assured that African-American clubs and organizations would have access to the buildings owned by the Akron YWCA.
The range of segregated African-American clubs and organizations affiliated with the YWCA was wide.
African Americans formed athletic teams and gym classes. These segregated groups were allowed to use the gymnasium at the new, state-of-the-art building on South High Street that had opened in 1931. Black women also formed separate clubs in the Business and Industrial Girls Department. These clubs, likewise, had access to rooms reserved for the Business and Industrial Department. These segregated groups organized socials and forays into the gym.
Before World War II, a few of Akron's YWCA facilities were integrated. African Americans were allowed to eat in the dining room. A few worked for the Akron YWCA, primarily in food services. These employees, however, were not paid at the same rate as the white workers. African-American women were allowed to stay in the YWCA's dormitory but only as transients not as long-term residents. A few African Americans served on committees.
By 1935, the Akron YWCA had only 100 African-American members, most of them involved in segregated clubs and organizations that met downtown at the headquarters. That number would more than triple during World War II, when more and more African-American women came to the city in search of lucrative jobs in the rubber factories.
These women faced harassment and abuse in the rubber factories. Outside the factory gates, they had difficulty finding housing, restaurants to serve them and wholesome, safe entertainment. Akron's YWCA with its segregated athletic teams, gym classes and physical culture program was a welcome respite from the antagonism many African-American women faced at work and outside it. This is not to say that the African-American women were welcomed wholeheartedly into the YWCA. The Akron YWCA was having its own race-relations problems.
During much of World War II, the Akron YWCA carried on a policy of segregation. African Americans had their own clubs, organizations and teams. Only the Girl Reserves were beginning to integrate. In 1944, Helen Lindsey, general secretary of the Akron YWCA, admitted there was a problem -- "Very little has been done for Negroes or to educate the white population of Akron to an acceptance of Negroes. There are tensions at many points." She didn't blame the native Akronites; the problem, she said, were the new white workers flooding into the city. They were, she said, far less tolerant of the African-American community.
But the problems were far more complicated than Lindsey was willing to admit to the national headquarters. Racial barriers within the Akron YWCA were strong. Attempts at integrating programs and facilities were meeting with mixed results at best.
Integration attempts had led to a schism between the International Institute and the YWCA.
At the International Institute, new immigration secretary Laura Haines tried to break down some racial barriers by inviting the YWCA Business and Industrial Club of Young Negro Women to a special dinner party of the Russian Women's Club. Although highly controversial, the event went well. But the new International Institute programming that included Jamaicans, Mexicans, Negroes, Japanese Americans, Chinese and Jews was bitterly criticized.
The integration of the pool remained a topic of discussion and debate for years. The question was whether blacks should be allowed to swim with whites. With the integration of some of the Girl Reserves clubs, the board had to act. Following the recommendation of the secretary of the Health Education Committee, the pool was integrated for the Girl Reserves in 1944. At the same time, the board decided to allow many of the segregated African-American associations to use the pool as well. In 1947, the pool was open to everyone regardless of race. In the process, the Akron YWCA made city history. The YWCA's pool was the first -- and for a number of years the only -- pool in Akron open to all races, creeds and colors. Soon, thereafter, Camp YaWaCa was opened to all young women, regardless of race.
Akron's YWCA had more difficulty dealing with the prospect of co-ed, interracial socials, dances and swims. Officially, the matter was left to each individual department or club. Initially that meant that teen dances were open only to whites. Later, African-American girls were allowed to attend. Not until after 1950 were African-American boys admitted. The same pattern was followed for the co-ed swim parties.
The teen canteen, El Patio, however was integrated from its start in 1950. El Patio soon became especially popular among African-American teens; fewer and fewer white teens attended. The Akron organization controlled what it perceived as an unacceptable situation by imposing a quota on the African-African teens; blacks would be limited to only 25 percent of the membership.
El Patio policies notwithstanding, the Akron YWCA was becoming a leader in race relations in the city. In 1945, the YWCA participated in the "Akron Interracial Clinic" held under the auspices of the Akron Ministerial Association and the Akron Minister's association, one of the few community organizations to do so. The next year, Dorothy Height, secretary for interracial education for the national organization, came to Akron to help the local association think through its racial policies.
The progress that the Akron organization was making in race relations, however, was coming at a price. The leadership and much of the membership of the International Institute broke away and formed their own organization in a public dispute, in part over the race relations and integrated programming. Some committee members of the YWCA warned the Akron group was moving too fast in race relations, that the city was not ready for such progressive actions.
Those warnings seemed especially prophetic in 1948.
Sponsored by the Akron Council on Race Relations, controversial Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes was scheduled to speak at the YWCA in Akron. When the city and membership found out, postcards started rolling into the YWCA offices, imploring the association to cancel the lecture because of Hughes' Communist sympathies and threatening violence.
Executive Director Maude Gill buckled to the pressure and cancelled the lecture, saying that the event would draw crowds far in excess of the YWCA's capacity and put the other women in the building at risk. Gill emphasized the YWCA was not submitting to threats but only attempting to avoid incidents that would be detrimental to the community. No other location could be found and the Hughes speech had to be cancelled.
The Akron association was roundly criticized for its action. One letter in the Beacon Journal took the Akron YWCA to task for buckling to pressure and denying Hughes' freedom of speech. Editorials in newspapers in many cities echoed that criticism.
Notwithstanding the Hughes lecture, by the end of the 1940s, the Akron YWCA had made much progress toward the integration.
African Americans represented 10 percent of the association's membership. Many black members were still involved solely in the segregated clubs and organizations -- the Girl Reserves, gym clubs, athletic teams and Business and Industry groups -- but some were venturing into the fully interracial clubs.
Many of the facilities -- the pool, the gymnasium, the showers, the lockers, the dining room -- were open to black as well as white members. African Americans were also making their way onto important committees, including the Board of Directors, that determined the future direction of the association.
Operating under the national's new "Interracial Charter," the Akron YWCA embraced its sentiments. In 1950, the Board of Directors voted to open all facilities to everyone on the same basis.
In 1952, the Akron Community Audit studying discrimination in the city, pointed to the YWCA as one of the bright spots in the community. "The YWCA is practically the only organization which has a full and complete democratic policy and practice." That sentiment had already been expressed by the national YWCA. In 1946, the national YWCA highlighted the Akron association for setting an example for tolerance. Akron's inclusion of all foreign and racial groups was lauded as a "working plan" for other YWCA associations across the nation.
In the decades that followed, the Akron YWCA took stances in support of diversity. In 1964, the association called for the defeat of city Issue 6, which would hamper Akron's Fair Housing Ordinance, and supported an proposal to eliminate discrimination in housing.
In 1984, the Akron YWCA took to the streets in an ambitious voter registration campaign for women and minorities. In 1987, the Akron YW started the Black Women of Excellence Awards (now the Women of Achievement) and was one of the original community partners in the Coming Together Project.
Today the Akron YWCA embraces the "One Imperative." The organization has a growing minority membership. The association's employees reflect the diversity of the community. Akron YWCA services and programs are available to all regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, place of origin or sexual orientation.Photos courtesy of The University of Akron Archives.
